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AP: ‘This is what global warming looks like’

July 3, 2012 by Ken Ward Jr.

A tree lays down in the front lawn at a home Saturday, June 30, 2012 in Charleston, W.Va. Violent storms swept across the eastern U.S., killing at least nine people and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands on a day that temperatures across the region are expected to reach triple-digits. Officials said about 500,000 people were without power in West Virginia. (AP Photo/Jeff Gentner)

Here’s one of the important take-home messages from the current weather situation in West Virginia and beyond, courtesy of the great AP science writer, Seth Borenstein:

If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.

These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change, although it’s far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren’t having similar disasters now, although they’ve had their own extreme events in recent years.

But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.

So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.

“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level,” said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. “The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.”

The Squirrel Creek Fire burns along the ridge line of Sheep Mountain on Monday, July 2, 2012, southwest of Laramie, Wyo. Crews in Wyoming faced erratic winds and dry, fire-fueling conditions Monday as they fought three large forest fires that have forced hundreds of evacuations across the state. (AP Photo/The Casper Star-Tribune, Alan Rogers)

Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in fire-charred Colorado, said these are the very record-breaking conditions he has said would happen, but many people wouldn’t listen. So it’s I told-you-so time, he said.

As recently as March, a special report an extreme events and disasters by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of “unprecedented extreme weather and climate events.” Its lead author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University, said Monday, “It’s really dramatic how many of the patterns that we’ve talked about as the expression of the extremes are hitting the U.S. right now.”

“What we’re seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like,” said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. “It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters.”

Oppenheimer said that on Thursday. That was before the East Coast was hit with triple-digit temperatures and before a derecho — an unusually strong, long-lived and large straight-line wind storm — blew through Chicago to Washington. The storm and its aftermath killed more than 20 people and left millions without electricity. Experts say it had energy readings five times that of normal thunderstorms.

Fueled by the record high heat, this was one of the most powerful of this type of storm in the region in recent history, said research meteorologist Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storm Laboratory in Norman, Okla. Scientists expect “non-tornadic wind events” like this one and other thunderstorms to increase with climate change because of the heat and instability, he said.

Alan Eckley and his fiancee Sheila Carr walk back to their home near Rutledge, Minn. Friday, June 22, 2012. Eckley, whose house was surrounded by the swollen Pine River, said this is the worst flooding he has seen in Rutledge in his lifetime. As floodwaters in northeastern Minnesota receded Friday, state officials got a closer look at some of the damage and kept a watchful eye on communities downriver of Duluth  where hundreds of people have been evacuated. The St. Louis River crested earlier in the week, but a chance for rain and thunderstorms Saturday could create problems for storm drainage systems and infrastructure already overwhelmed by this week’s record rainfall. (AP Photo/Minnesota Public Radio, Jeffrey Thompson)

Such patterns haven’t happened only in the past week or two. The spring and winter in the U.S. were the warmest on record and among the least snowy, setting the stage for the weather extremes to come, scientists say.

Since Jan. 1, the United States has set more than 40,000 hot temperature records, but fewer than 6,000 cold temperature records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Through most of last century, the U.S. used to set cold and hot records evenly, but in the first decade of this century America set two hot records for every cold one, said Jerry Meehl, a climate extreme expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This year the ratio is about 7 hot to 1 cold. Some computer models say that ratio will hit 20-to-1 by midcentury, Meehl said.

“In the future you would expect larger, longer more intense heat waves and we’ve seen that in the last few summers,” NOAA Climate Monitoring chief Derek Arndt said.

The 100-degree heat, drought, early snowpack melt and beetles waking from hibernation early to strip trees all combined to set the stage for the current unusual spread of wildfires in the West, said University of Montana ecosystems professor Steven Running, an expert on wildfires.

While at least 15 climate scientists told The Associated Press that this long hot U.S. summer is consistent with what is to be expected in global warming, history is full of such extremes, said John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He’s a global warming skeptic who says, “The guilty party in my view is Mother Nature.”

But the vast majority of mainstream climate scientists, such as Meehl, disagree: “This is what global warming is like, and we’ll see more of this as we go into the future.”

An OhioHealth billboard was mangled from Friday afternoon’s severe storm, June 29, 2012. A wave of violent storms sweeping through the mid-Atlantic following a day of record-setting heat in Washington, D.C., has knocked out power to nearly 2 million people. The storms converged Friday night on Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin declared a state of emergency after more than 500,000 customers in 27 counties were left without electricity. (The Columbus Dispatch /Eamon Queeney)

A man in his early 50’s suffers a severe heart attack. In looking over his health history, the following facts appear. He is obese. He makes poor nutritional choices. He smokes heavily. He does not exercise. He has a family history of heart disease. And he has a high stress job and stressful family situation. So which of these caused the heart attack?

Extreme climate patterns are predicted within the models of overall global warming as greenhouse gas concentrations increase. Thus, the derecho on the heels of record breaking heat.

Humans have had significant impact on climate for several thousand years, in particular with the deforestation and severe soil erosion in the Middle East, North Africa, and even places such as Haiti. Such large scale terrain change impacts the hydrological cycle. However, the massive influx of greenhouse gases and particle pollution is likely to dwarf those earlier anthropogenic climate alterations.

I pessimistically fear that we are still several years and several major weather calamities away from waking up to really get a grip on addressing anthropogenic climate change. As the saying goes, “Follow the money.” When those who make money from “business as usual,” or we who have our comfortable, energy-fueled lives, begin to feel the financial and comfort pinch, then change will set in motion. But it can be hard to stop when one is falling off a cliff…

The skeptic said that Mother Nature is to blame. This is true, but what I can’t understand is why he thinks that “Mother Nature’s” systems can’t be disrupted by mankind’s activity. Atmospheric CO2 has gone from 280 ppm in pre-industrial time to near 397 ppm currently. That’s a huge change! In a human, if blood CO2 levels went up by the same magnitude, he/she would be in dire straits if not dead. Unfortunately our Mother will probably have to suffer a heart attack before we change our lifestyles.